Online advertising has been a hot topic for the past week or so, with Ars Technica trying out an interesting, somewhat desperate experiment wherein they blocked access to their content for people using Adblock. Of course, if this were to become some kind of movement among publishers, it would probably just spark a technological cat-and-mouse game that would surely be reminiscent of DRM cracking or iPhone jailbreaking. But in their post-mortem, Ars states that it was a worthwhile awareness campaign, and I hope that's true. But I thought it would be a good idea to try to bring the collective OSNews brainpower together and crowdsource the idea of how to raise money for a web site in an age where advertising is increasingly un-viable.

For me, I don't mind having ads; I have no ad blocking software in place on my web browser because through the advertising it allows small websites like osnews to pay the bills and provide me (the lazy schmuck behind the desk) to have some great articles being written.

With that being said, it doesn't help when many websites have big obnoxious advertisements that turn me off their website immediately because of it. I don't mind a modest size ad but when you've got misleading, distracting, dishonest and irrelevant ads then you're going to find it more and more difficult to make your case to your readership to put your website on their whitelist. If you have scareware advertisements on your website - am I really going to take your website seriously? if your advertisers have flashing ads that distract me from reading the article - is that really going to entice me to stay for long periods of time? its time for webmasters to wake up.